Web Standards

This is a fantastic post by Ahmad Shadeed. It digs into the practical construction of a header on a website — the kind of work that many of us regularly do. It looks like it's going to be fairly easy to create the header at first, but it starts to get complicated as considerations for screen sizes, edge cases, interactions, and CSS layout possibilities enter the mix. This doesn't even get into cross-browser concerns, which have been somewhat less of a struggle lately, but is always there.

It's sometimes hard to explain the interesting and tricky situations that define our work in front-end development, and this article does a good job of showcasing that.

These two illustrations set the scene really well:

That's not to dunk on designers. I've done this to myself plenty of times. Plus, any designer worth their salt thinks about these things right off the bat. The reality is that the implementation weirdness largely falls to the front-end developer and the designer can help when big choices need to be made or the solutions need to be clarified.

The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:

img {
max-width: 100%;
height auto; /* default */
}

Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end developer devices (like mine with 16GB RAM), few or no performance problems occur. But on low-end devices? It’s another story.

The above illustration isn’t detailed enough. I’m from Nigeria and, if your product works in Africa, then you shouldn’t be looking at that. Look at this graph instead:

Nowadays, the lowest-priced iPhone sells for an average of $300. The average African can’t afford it even though iPhone is a threshold for measuring fast devices.

That’s all the business analysis you need to understand that CSS width doesn’t cut it for responsive images. What would, you ask? Let me first explain what images are about.

Nuances of images

Images are appealing to users but are a painstaking challenge for us developers who must consider the following factors:

Format

Disk size

Render dimension (layout width and height in the browser)

Original dimension (original width and height)

Aspect ratio

So, how do we pick the right parameters and deftly mix and match them to deliver an optimal experience for your audience? The answer, in turn, depends on the answers to these questions:

Are the images created dynamically by the user or statically by a design team?

If the width and height of the image are changed disproportionately, would that affect the quality?

Are all the images rendered at the same width and height? When rendered, must they have a specific aspect ratio or one that’s entirely different?

What must be considered when presenting the images on different viewports?

Jot down your answers. They will not only help you understand your images — their sources, technical requirements and such — but also enable you to make the right choices in delivery.

Provisional strategies for image delivery

Image delivery has evolved from a simple addition of URLs to the src attribute to complex scenarios. Before delving into them, let’s talk about the multiple options for presenting images so that you can devise a strategy on how and when to deliver and render yours.

First, identify the sources of the images. That way, the number of obscure edge cases can be reduced and the images can be handled as efficiently as possible.

In general, images are either:

Dynamic: Dynamic images are uploaded by the audience, having been generated by other events in the system.

Static: A photographer, designer, or you (the developer) create the images for the website.

Let's dig into strategy for each of this types of images.

Strategy for dynamic images

Static images are fairly easy to work with. On the other hand, dynamic images are tricky and prone to problems. What can be done to mitigate their dynamic nature and make them more predictable like static images? Two things: validation and intelligent cropping.

Validation

Set out a few rules for the audience on what is acceptable and what is not. Nowadays, we can validate all the properties of an image, namely:

Format

Disk size

Dimension

Aspect ratio

Note: An image’s render size is determined during rendering, hence no validation on our part.

After validation, a predictable set of images would emerge, which are easier to consume.

Intelligent Cropping

Another strategy for handling dynamic images is to crop them intelligently to avoid deleting important content and refocus on (or re-center) the primary content. That’s hard to do. However, you can take advantage of the artificial intelligence offered by open-source tools or SaaS companies that specialize in image management. An example is in the upcoming sections.

Once a strategy has been nailed down for dynamic images, create a rule table with all the layout options for the images. Below is an example. It's even worth looking into analytics to determine the most important devices and viewport sizes.

Note: The ellipsis (...) in the image URL specifies the folder, dimension, and cropping strategy, which are too much detail to include, hence the truncation to focus on what matters now. For the complete version, see the CodePen example down below.

This is the shortest CSS example on the Internet that makes images responsive:

the image size and weight are the same on both high-end and low-end devices, and

we might want to be stricter with the image width instead of setting it to 250 and letting it grow.

Well, this section covers "the bare minimum" so that’s it.

Layout variations

The worst thing that can happen to an image layout is mismanagement of expectations. Because images might have varying dimensions (width and height), we must specify how to render the images.

Should we intelligently crop all the images to a uniform dimension? Should we retain the aspect ratio for a viewport and alter the ratio for a different one? The ball is in our court.

In case of images in a grid, such as those in the example above with different aspect ratios, we can apply the technique of art direction to render the images. Art direction can help achieve something like this:

Instead of rendering only one 700px wide image, we render 700px x 700px only if the viewport width exceeds 700px. If the viewport is larger, then the following rendering occurs:

Camera lens images are rendered as a portrait image of 700px in width and 1000px. in height (700px x 1000px).

PS4 Pro images are rendered at 1000px x 1000px.

Art direction

By cropping images to make them responsive, we might inadvertently delete the primary content, like the face of the subject. As mentioned previously, AI open-source tools can help crop intelligently and refocus on the primary objects of images. In addition, Nadav Soferman’s post on smart cropping is a useful start guide.

Strict grid and spanning

The first example on responsive images in this post is a flexible one. At a minimum of 300px width, grid items automagically flow into place according to the viewport width. Terrific.

On the other hand, we might want to apply a stricter rule to the grid items based on the design specifications. In that case, media queries come in handy.

Alternatively, we can leverage the grid-span capability to create grid items of varied widths and lengths:

For an image that is 1000px x 1000px square on a wide viewport, we can span it to take two grid cells on both row and column. The image that changes to a portrait orientation (700px x 1000px) on a wider viewport can take two cells on a row.

Blind optimization is as lame as no optimization. Don’t focus on optimization without predefining the appropriate measurements. And don’t optimize if the optimization is not backed by data.

Nonetheless, ample room exists for optimization in the above examples. We started with the bare minimum, showed you some cool tricks, and now we have a working, responsive grid. The next question to ask is, "If the page contains 20-100 images, how good will the user experience be?"

Here’s the answer: We must ensure that in the case of numerous images for rendering, their size fits the device that renders them. To accomplish that, we need to specify the URLs of several images instead of one. The browser would pick the right (most optimal) one according to the criteria. This technique is called resolution switching in responsive images. See this code example:

Thanks to resolution switching, if the browser is resized, then it downloads the right image for the right viewport; hence small images for small phones (good on CPU and RAM) and larger images for larger viewports.

The above table shows that the browser downloads the same image (blue rectangle) with different disk sizes (red rectangle).

Cloudinary’s open-source and free Responsive Image Breakpoints Generator is extremely useful for adapting website images to multiple screen sizes. However, in many cases, setting srcset and sizes alone would suffice.

Conclusion

This article aims at affording simple yet effective guidelines for setting up responsive images and layouts in light of the many—and potentially confusing—options available. Do familiarize yourself with CSS grid, art direction, and resolution switching and you’ll be a ninja in short order. Keep practicing!

Rachel Andrew says that the CSS Working Group designed an aspect ratio unit at a recent meeting. The idea is to find an elegant solution to those times when we want the height of an element to be calculated in response to the width of the element, or vice versa.

Say, for example, we have a grid layout with a row of elements that should maintain a square (1:1) ratio. There are a few existing, but less-than-ideal ways we can go:

Define one explicit dimension. If we define the height of the items in the grid but use an intrinsic value on the template columns (e.g. auto-fill), then we no longer know the width of the element as the container responds to the browser viewport. The elements will grow and squish but never maintain that perfect square.

Define explicit dimensions. Sure, we can tell an element to be 200px wide and 200px tall, but what happens when more content is added to an item than there is space? Now we have an overflow problem.

Use the padding hack. The block-level (top-to-bottom) padding percentage of an element is calculated by the element's inline width and we can use that to calculate height. But, as Rachel suggests, it's totally un-intuitive and tough to maintain.

Very cool! But where does the proposal go from here? The aspect-ratio is included in the rough draft of the CSS Sizing 4 specification. Create an issue in the CSSWG GitHub repo if you have ideas or suggestions. Or, as Rachel suggests, comment on her Smashing Magazine post or even write up your own post and send it along. This is a great chance to add your voice to a possible new feature.

I am likely going to write a “CSS for JavaScripters” book, and therefore I need to figure out how to explain CSS to JavaScripters. This series of article smippets are a sort of try-out — pre-drafts I’d like to get feedback on in order to figure out if I’m on the right track.

Today I continue to look at CSS as a programming language. The question whether it is one or not is a very hot topic right now, but I’m not terribly interested in the answer.

Instead, I’d like to know if describing certain CSS structures in programming terms helps you learn CSS better or quicker, or if it hinders you. In other words, is there any educational value in treating CSS as a programming language?

Please tell me if the explanation below is helpful or confusing to you.

if statements

An area where the CSS programming language is less developed than JavaScript is control structures — or so it would seem.

Still, CSS has if statements. Here are a few examples:

@media all and (max-width: 900px) {
}
@supports (display: flex) {
}

These mean “if the layout viewport is at most 900px wide” and “if the CSS engine accepts display: flex.” There is no doubt that these are actual if statements: the code blocks are only applied if the condition is true. (Also, the specification for @media and @supports is called CSS Conditional Rules. That’s a dead giveaway: at-rules are meant to be if statements.)

But let’s take a look at a — dare I say it? — more iffy example. Is the following also an if statement?

menu a {
color: red;
}

“If there is a link within a menu, make it red.” Several people I interviewed for the book were passionate in their belief that selectors are if statements as well.

Do you agree? Do I agree? I’m not sure, although I do see the point: it is possible to see selectors as such. Whether you consider them true if statements probably depends on your definition of an if statement.

for loops

Let’s make things slightly more complicated by considering for loops. Now at first sight it would appear CSS doesn’t have any. Still, what about the same bit of code we saw above?

menu a {
color: red;
}

In a way, a selector like the one above could be considered a primitive for-loop. The browser is told to loop through all <a> elements inside a <menu> element and apply a red colour.

Is a selector a for loop? Can it even be an if statement and for loop at the same time? Again, this depends on your definitions of for loops and if statements.

I’d like to mention in passing that it is possible to add extra logic to CSS for loops.

These extra selectors can be treated as if statements within a for loop: go through all links in a menu, but skip this one and give that one special treatment.

Declarative vs imperative

Let’s take the most expansive view and say that CSS selectors can be considered both if statements and for loops. That will sound fairly weird for anyone with a background in JavaScript, since these two types of control structures are simply not the same. So how can you replace both by a single structure?

Here, I think, we once again see that CSS is a declarative language, and not an imperative one. In declarative languages some simple control structures can be expressed much more succinctly than in imperative ones.

Take the last code example above. In JavaScript we’d have to say something like:

for (all menus) {
for (all links in this menu) {
let first = [figure out if this is the first link in the menu]
if (first) {
link.color = 'blue'
} else if (link.id !== 'current') {
link.color = 'red';
}
}
}

The drawback of the JavaScript version is that it’s more verbose than the CSS version, and hence more prone to error. The advantage is that it offers much finer control than CSS. In CSS, we’ve just about reached the limits of what we can express. We could add a lot more logic to the JavaScript version, if we wish.

In CSS, we tell the browser how links should look. In JavaScript, we describe the algorithm for figuring out how an individual link should look. Neither is wrong, but in this example the CSS way is the more efficient way.

Personally, I’m fine with seeing CSS selectors as if statements and for loops at the same time. However, I feel that once you start understanding CSS, the fact that selectors are ifs/fors becomes less and less relevant. Instead, selectors are just selectors: great for relatively simple declarations; less so for very complex ones.

Helpful or confusing?

If you’re a JavaScripter who’d like to get to know CSS better I’d love to hear if the few examples above are helping or confusing you. The more feedback I get, the better I can write a book that helps you learn CSS instead of just confusing you.

Thanks.

Feedback

Badly formatted

See also https://csswizardry.com/2015/04/cyclomatic-complexity-logic-in-css/

Let's say you wanted to scroll a web page from top to bottom programmatically. For example, you're recording a screencast and want a nice full-page scroll. You probably can't scroll it yourself because it'll be all uneven and jerky. Native JavaScript can do smooth scrolling. Here's a tiny snippet that might do the trick for you:

The idea is to transform a negative top position for the height of the entire document, but subtract the height of what you can see so it doesn't scroll too far. There is a little magic number in there you may need to adjust to get it just right for you.

Here's a movie I recorded that way:

It's still not perrrrrrfectly smooth. I partially blame the FPS of the video, but even with my eyeballs watching it record it wasn't total butter. If I needed even higher quality, I'd probably restart my computer and have this page open as the only tab and application open, lolz.

It's entirely too common to make broad-sweeping statements about all websites. Jason Miller:

We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However, the extent to which these generalizations hold for the performance and architectural characteristics we care about varies.

Just the other morning, at breakfast an An Event Apart, I sat with a fellow who worked on a university website with a massive amount of pages. Also at the table was someone who worked at a media company with a wide swath of brands, but all largely sites with blog-like content. There was also someone who worked on a developer tool that was heavy on dashboards. We can all care about accessibility, performance, maintainability, etc., but the appropriate technology stacks and delivery processes are quite different both in what we actually do and what we probably should do.

It's a common stab at solving for these different sites by making two buckets: web sites and web apps. Or dynamic sites and static sites. Or content sites and everything else. Jason builds us more buckets ("holotypes"):

This is almost like reading a "Top 50 Movies of All Time" blog post, where everyone and their mother have a little something to say about it. Tough to carve the entire web into slices without someone feeling like their thing doesn't categorize well.

I like the nuance here, much like Jason (and Addy's) "Rendering on the Web" article that addresses the spectrum of how certain types of sites should be delivered.

GraphQL is becoming increasingly popular. The problem is that if you are a front-end developer, you are only half of the way there. GraphQL is not just a client technology. The server also has to be implemented according to the specification. This means that in order to implement GraphQL into your application, you need to learn not only GraphQL on the front end, but also GraphQL best practices, server-side development, and everything that goes along with it on the back end.

There will come a time when you will also have to deal with issues like scaling your server, complex authorization scenarios, malicious queries, and more issues that require more expertise and even deeper knowledge around what is traditionally categorized as back-end development.

Thankfully, we have an array of managed back-end service providers today that allow front-end developers to only worry about implementing features on the front end without having to deal with all of the traditional back-end work.

Services like Firebase (API) / AWS AppSync (database), Cloudinary (media), Algolia (search) and Auth0 (authentication) allow us to offload our complex infrastructure to a third-party provider and instead focus on delivering value to end users in the form of new features instead.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to take advantage of AWS AppSync, a managed GraphQL service, to build a full-stack application without writing a single line of back-end code.

While the framework we’re working in is React, the concepts and API calls we will be using are framework-agnostic and will work the same in Angular, Vue, React Native, Ionic or any other JavaScript framework or application.

We will be building a restaurant review app. In this app, we will be able to create a restaurant, view restaurants, create a review for a restaurant, and view reviews for a restaurant.

The tools and frameworks that we will be using are React, AWS Amplify, and AWS AppSync.

AWS Amplify is a framework that allows us to create and connect to cloud services, like authentication, GraphQL APIs, and Lambda functions, among other things. AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service.

We’ll use Amplify to create and connect to an AppSync API, then write the client side React code to interact with the API.

The first thing we’ll do is create a React project and move into the new directory:

npx create-react-app ReactRestaurants
cd ReactRestaurants

Next, we’ll install the dependencies we’ll be using for this project. AWS Amplify is the JavaScript library we’ll be using to connect to the API, and we’ll use Glamor for styling.

yarn add aws-amplify glamor

The next thing we need to do to is install and configure the Amplify CLI:

npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli
amplify configure

Amplify’s configure will walk you through the steps needed to begin creating AWS services in your account. For a walkthrough of how to do this, check out this video.

Now that the app has been created and Amplify is ready to go, we can initialize a new Amplify project.

amplify init

Amplify init will walk you through the steps to initialize a new Amplify project. It will prompt you for your desired project name, environment name, and text editor of choice. The CLI will auto-detect your React environment and select smart defaults for the rest of the options.

Creating the GraphQL API

One we’ve initialized a new Amplify project, we can now add the Restaurant Review GraphQL API. To add a new service, we can run the amplify add command.

amplify add api

This will walk us through the following steps to help us set up the API:

? Please select from one of the below mentioned services GraphQL
? Provide API name bigeats
? Choose an authorization type for the API API key
? Do you have an annotated GraphQL schema? N
? Do you want a guided schema creation? Y
? What best describes your project: Single object with fields
? Do you want to edit the schema now? Y

The CLI should now open a basic schema in the text editor. This is going to be the schema for our GraphQL API.

In this schema, we’re creating two main types: Restaurant and Review. Notice that we have @model and @connection directives in our schema.

These directives are part of the GraphQL Transform tool built into the Amplify CLI. GraphQL Transform will take a base schema decorated with directives and transform our code into a fully functional API that implements the base data model.

If we were spinning up our own GraphQL API, then we’d have to do all of this manually:

Define the schema

Define the operations against the schema (queries, mutations, and subscriptions)

Create the data sources

Write resolvers that map between the schema operations and the data sources.

With the @model directive, the GraphQL Transform tool will scaffold out all schema operations, resolvers, and data sources so all we have to do is define the base schema (step 1). The @connection directive will let us model relationships between the models and scaffold out the appropriate resolvers for the relationships.

In our schema, we use @connection to define a relationship between Restaurant and Reviews. This will create a unique identifier for the restaurant ID for the review in the final generated schema.

Now that we’ve created our base schema, we can create the API in our account.

amplify push
? Are you sure you want to continue? Yes
? Do you want to generate code for your newly created GraphQL API Yes
? Choose the code generation language target javascript
? Enter the file name pattern of graphql queries, mutations and subscriptions src/graphql/**/*.js
? Do you want to generate/update all possible GraphQL operations - queries, mutations and subscriptions Yes

Because we’re creating a GraphQL application, we typically would need to write all of our local GraphQL queries, mutations and subscriptions from scratch. Instead, the CLI will be inspecting our GraphQL schema and then generating all of the definitions for us and saving them locally for us to use.

After this is complete, the back end has been created and we can begin accessing it from our React application.

If you’d like to view your AppSync API in the AWS dashboard, visit https://console.aws.amazon.com/appsync and click on your API. From the dashboard you can view the schema, data sources, and resolvers. You can also perform queries and mutations using the built-in GraphQL editor.

Building the React client

Now that the API is created and we can begin querying for and creating data in our API. There will be three operations we will be using to interact with our API:

Creating a new restaurant

Querying for restaurants and their reviews

Creating a review for a restaurant

Before we start building the app, let’s take a look at how these operations will look and work.

Interacting with the AppSync GraphQL API

When working with a GraphQL API, there are many GraphQL clients available.

We can use any GraphQL client we’d would like to interact with an AppSync GraphQL API, but there are two that are configured specifically to work most easily. These are the Amplify client (what we will use) and the AWS AppSync JS SDK (similar API to Apollo client).

The Amplify client is similar to the fetch API in that it is promise-based and easy to reason about. The Amplify client does not support offline out of the box. The AppSync SDK is more complex but does support offline out of the box.

To call the AppSync API with Amplify, we use the API category. Here’s an example of how to call a query:

Now that our Header is created, we’ll update src/App.js. This file will hold all of the interactions with the API, so it is pretty large. We’ll define the methods and pass them down as props to the components that will call them.

We first create some initial state to hold the restaurants array that we will be fetching from our API. We also create Booleans to control our UI and a selectedRestaurant object.

In componentDidMount, we query for the restaurants and update the state to hold the restaurants retrieved from the API.

In createRestaurant and createReview, we send mutations to the API. Also notice that we provide an optimistic update by updating the state immediately so that the UI gets updated before the response comes back in order to make our UI snappy.

This component is the main view of the app. We map over the list of restaurants and show the restaurant image, its name and location, and links that will open overlays to show reviews and create a new review.

Next, we’ll look at the Reviews component (src/Reviews.js). In this component, we map over the list of reviews for the chosen restaurant.

Next, we’ll take a look at the CreateRestaurant component (src/CreateRestaurant.js). This component holds a form that keeps up with the form state. The createRestaurant class method will call this.props.createRestaurant, passing in the form state.

Next, we’ll take a look at the CreateReview component (src/CreateReview.js). This component holds a form that keeps up with the form state. The createReview class method will call this.props.createReview, passing in the restaurant ID and the form state.

Now that we have built our back-end, configured the app and created our components, we’re ready to test it out:

npm start

Now, navigate to http://localhost:3000. Congratulations, you’ve just built a full-stack serverless GraphQL application!

Conclusion

The next logical step for many applications is to apply additional security features, like authentication, authorization and fine-grained access control. All of these things are baked into the service. To learn more about AWS AppSync security, check out the documentation.

If you’d like to add hosting and a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline for your app, check out the Amplify Console.

This is not a sponsored post. I requested a beta access for this site called Stackbit a while back, got my invite the other day, and thought it was a darn fine idea that's relevant to us web nerds — particularly those of us who spin up a lot of JAMstack sites.

I'm a big fan of the whole idea of JAMstack sites. Take our new front-end development conferences website as one little example. That site is a custom theme built with 11ty, version controlled on GitHub, hosted on Netlify, and content-managed with Netlify CMS.

Each JAMstack site is a little selection of services (⬅ I'm rebuilding that site to be even more JAMstacky!). I think it's clever that Stackbit helps make those choices quickly.

Pick a theme, a site generator, a CMS, a repository platform, and a deployment service... and go! Like this:

Smooth scrolling has gotten a lot easier. If you want it all the time on your page, and you are happy letting the browser deal with the duration for you, it's a single line of CSS:

html {
scroll-behavior: smooth;
}

I tried this on version 17 of this site, and it was the second most-hated thing, aside from the beefy scrollbar. I haven't changed the scrollbar. I like it. I'm a big user of scrollbars and making it beefy is extra usable for me and the custom styling is just fun. But I did revert to no smooth scrolling.

The recent design for moved paragraphs in mobile diffs called for an animated scroll when clicking from one instance of the paragraph in question to the other. The purpose of this animation is to help the user stay oriented in terms of where the paragraph got moved to.

We initially thought this behavior would benefit Minerva in general (e.g. when using the table of contents to navigate to a page section it would be awesome to animate the scroll), but after trying it out decided to scope this change just to the mobile diffs view for now

I can see not being able to adjust timing being a downside, but that wasn't what made me ditch smooth scrolling. The thing that seemed to frustrate a ton of people was on-page search. It's one thing to click a link and get zoomed to some header (that feels sorta good) but it's another when you're trying to quickly pop through matches when you do a Find on the page. People found the scrolling between matches slow and frustrating. I agreed.

...has no ability to adjust timing. Nor is there a reliable way to detect if the page is actively being searched in order to make UX changes, like turning off smooth scrolling.

Perhaps the largest downside of smooth scrolling is the potential to mismanage focus. Scrolling to an element in JavaScript is fine, so long as you almost move focus to where you are scrolling. Heather Migliorisi covers that in detail here.

I've long told people that one way to level up your front-end design and development skills, especially in your early days, is to understand how to change classes. I can write a few lines of JavaScript to add/remove an active class and build a tabbed interface quite quickly. But did I build the HTML in such a way that it's accessible by default? Did I deal with keyboard events? Did I deal with all the relevant aria-* attributes? I'll answer for myself here: no. I've gotten better about it over time, but sadly my muscle memory for the correct pattern isn't always there.

I'm optimistic though. For example, React has a blessed tabs solution that is accessible out of the box. I reach for those, and thus my muscle memory for building tabs now results in a more accessible product. And when I need to do routing/linking with React, I reach (get it?!) for Reach Router, and I get accessibility "baked in," as they say. That's a powerful thing to get "for free," again, as they say.

I almost wish our URLs had years in them because I still don't have a way to scope analytic data to only show me data from content published this year. I can see the most popular stuff from the year, but that's regardless of when it was published, and that's dominated by the big guides we've had for years and keep updated.

I have been a long-time reader of CSS-Tricks, but have not yet had something to contribute with. Until now. Being a Google Analytics specialist by day, this was at last something I could contribute to CSS-Tricks. Let’s extend Google Analytics on CSS-Tricks!

Enter Google Analytics custom dimensions

Google Analytics gives you a lot of interesting insights about what visitors are doing on a website, just by adding the basic Google Analytics snippet to every page.

But Google Analytics is a one-size-fits-all tool.

In order to make it truly meaningful for a specific website like CSS-Tricks we can add additional meta information to our Google Analytics data.

The year an article was posted is an example of such meta data that Google Analytics does not have out of the box, but it’s something that is easily added to make the data much more useful. That’s where custom dimensions come in.

Create the custom dimension in Google Analytics

The first thing to do is create the new custom dimension. In the Google Analytics UI, click the gear icon, click Custom Definitions and then click Custom Dimensions.

Google Analytics admin interface

This shows a list of any existing custom dimensions. Click the red button to create a new custom dimension.

Custom dimensions overview

Let’s give the custom dimension a descriptive name. In this case, "year" seems quite appropriate since that’s what we want to measure.

The scope is important because it defines how the meta data should be applied to the existing data. In this case, the article year is related to each article the user is viewing, so we need to set it to the "hit" scope.

Another example would be meta data about the entire session, like if the user is logged in, that would be saved in a session-scoped custom dimension.

Alright, let’s save our dimension.

When the custom dimension is created, Google Analytics provides examples for how to implement it using JavaScript. We’re allowed up to 20 custom dimensions and each custom dimension is identified by an index. In this case, "year" is the first custom dimension, so it was created in Index 1 (see dimension1 in the JavaScript code below).

Custom dimension created at Index 1

If we had other custom dimensions defined, then those would live in another index. There is no way to change the index of a custom dimension, so take note of the one being used. A list of all indices can always be found in the overview:

That’s it, now it’s time to code!

Now we have to extract the article year in the code and add it to the payload so that it is sent to Google Analytics with the page view hit.

This is the code we need to execute, per the snippet we were provided when creating the custom dimension:

Here is the tricky part. The ga() function is created when the Google Analytics snippet is loaded. In order to minimize the performance hit, it is placed at the bottom of the page on CSS-Tricks. This is what the basic Google Analytics snippet looks like:

This code is usually placed outside a WordPress Loop, but that’s where we would have access to meta information like the article year. Because of this, we need to store the article year in a JavaScript variable inside the loop, then reference that variable in the Google Analytics snippet when we get to the bottom of the page.

The Google Analytics snippets is placed on all pages of the website, but the year does not make sense for all pages (e.g. the homepage). Being the good JavaScript developers that we are, we will check if the variable has been defined in order to avoid any errors.

That’s it! The Google Analytics page view hit will now include the article year for all pages where it is defined.

Custom dimensions do not apply to historical data

One thing to know about custom dimension — or any other modifications to your Google Analytics data — is that they only apply to new data being collected from the website. The custom dimensions described in this article was implemented in January 2019, and that means if we look at data from 2018 it will not have any data for the custom dimensions.

This is important to keep in mind for the rest of this article, when we begin to look into the data. The custom dimensions are added to all posts on CSS-Tricks, going all the way back to 2007, but we are only looking at page views that happened in 2019 — after the custom dimensions was implemented. For example, when we look at articles from 2011, we are not looking at page views in 2011 — we are looking at page views of posts from 2011 in 2019. This is important to keep in mind, when we start to look at posts from previous years.

All set? OK, let’s take a look at the new data!

Viewing the data in Google Analytics

The easiest way to see the new data is to go to Behavior ? Site Content ? All Pages, which will show the most viewed pages:

All Pages report

In the dropdown above the table, select "year" as a secondary dimension.

Year as secondary dimension

That gives us a table like the one below, showing the year for all articles. Notice how the homepage, which is the second most viewed page, is removed from the table because it does not have a year associated with it.

We start to get a better understanding of the website. The most viewed page (by far) is the complete guide to Flexbox which was published back in 2013. Talk about evergreen content!

Table with year as secondary dimension
Secondary is good, primary is better

OK, so the above table adds some understanding of the most viewed pages, but let’s flip the dimensions so that year is the primary dimension. There is no standard report for viewing custom dimensions as the primary dimension, so we need to create a custom report.

Custom Reports overview

Give the Custom Report a good name. Finding the metrics (blue) and dimensions (green) is easiest by searching.

Create the Custom Report

Here is what the final Custom Report should look like, with some useful metrics and dimensions. Notice how we have selected Page below Year. This will become useful in a second.

The final Custom Report

Once we hit Save, we see the aggregate numbers for all article years. 2013 is still on top, but we now see that 2011 also had some great content, which was not in the top 10 lists we previously looked at. This suggests that no single article from 2011 stood out, but in total, 2011 had some great articles that still receive a lot of views in 2019.

Aggregated numbers for article years

The percentage next to the number of page views is the percentage of the total page views. Notice how 2018 "only" accounts for 8.11% of all page views and 2019 accounts for 6.24%. This is not surprising, but shows that CSS-Tricks is partly a huge success because of the vast amount of strong reference material posted over the years, which users keep referring to.

Let’s look into 2011.

Remember how we set up the Custom Report with the Page below the Year in dimensions? This means we can now click 2011 and drill-down into that year.

It looks like a lot of almanac pages were published in 2011, which in aggregate has a lot of page views. Notice the lower-right corner where it says "1-10 of 375." This means that 375 articles from 2011 have been viewed on the site in 2019. That is impressive!

Back to the question: Great content from 2018

Before I forget: Let's answer that initial question from Chris.

Let's scope the analytics data to content published this year (2018). Here are the top 10 posts:

For the last few years, I've been trying to think of CSS-Tricks as this two-headed beast. One head is that we're trying to produce long-lasting referential content. We want to be a site that you come to or land on to find answers to front-end questions. The other head is that we want to be able to be read like a magazine. Subscribe, pop by once a week, snag the RSS feed... whatever you like, we hope CSS-Tricks is interesting to read as a hobbyist magazine or industry rag.

Let’s dig into that with another custom dimension: Post type. CSS-Tricks uses a number of custom post types like videos, almanac entries, and snippets in addition to the built-in post types, like posts or pages.

Let’s break this down even further by year with a secondary dimension and select 500 rows in the lower-right corner, so we get all 465 rows.

Top 10 authors and year

We can then export the data to Excel and make a pivot table of the data, counting authors per year.

Excel pivot table with count of authors per year

You like charts? We can make one with some beautiful v17 colors, showing the number of authors per year.

Authors per year

It is amazing to see the steady growth in authors contributing to CSS-Tricks per year. And given 2019 already has 33 different authors, it looks like 2019 could set a new record.

But are those new authors generating any page views?

Let’s make a new pivot chart where we compare Chris to all other authors.

Pivot table comparing page views

...and then chart that over time.

Share of page views by author per year

It definitely looks like CSS-Tricks is becoming a multi-author site. While Chris is still the #1 author, it is good to see that the constant flow of new high-quality content does not solely depend on him, which is a good trend for CSS-Tricks and makes it possible to cover a lot more topics going forward.

But what happened in 2011, you might ask? Let’s have a look. In a custom report, you can have five levels of dimensions. For now we will stick with four.

Custom report with four dimensions to drill into

Now we can click on the year 2011 and get the list of authors.

2011 authors

Hello Sara Cope! What awesome content did you write in 2011?

Sara Cope almanac pages

Looks like a lot of those almanac pages we saw earlier. Click that!

107 almanac pages by Sara Cope

Indeed, a lot of almanac pages! 107 to be exact. A lot of great content that still receives lots of page views in 2019 to boot.

Summary

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to understand what users are doing on your website, and with a little work, meta data that is specific to your website can make it extra powerful. As seen in this article, adding a few simple meta data that's already accessible in WordPress can unlock a world of opportunities to analyze and add a whole new dimension of knowledge about the content and visitors of a site, like we did here on CSS-Tricks.

Jamie Corkhill has written this wonderful post about Node and I think it’s perhaps one of the best technical articles I’ve ever read. Not only is it jam-packed with information for folks like me who aren't writing JavaScript everyday, it is also incredibly deliberate as Jamie slowly walks through the very basics of JavaScript (such as synchronous and asynchronous functions) all the way up to working with our very own API.

Jamie writes:

What is Node in the first place? What exactly does it mean for Node to be “asynchronous”, and how does that differ from “synchronous”? What is the meaning “event-driven” and “non-blocking” anyway, and how does Node fit into the bigger picture of applications, Internet networks, and servers?

We’ll attempt to answer all of these questions and more throughout this series as we take an in-depth look at the inner workings of Node, learn about the HyperText Transfer Protocol, APIs, and JSON, and build our very own Bookshelf API utilizing MongoDB, Express, Lodash, Mocha, and Handlebars.

I would highly recommend this post if JavaScript isn’t your day job but you’ve always wanted to learn about Node in a bit more detail.

Manuel Matuzovic makes the point that in order to use CSS grid in some fairly simple markup scenarios, we might be tempted to flatten our HTML to make sure all the elements we need to can participate on the grid. What we need is subgrid and non-buggy display: contents;, so I'd like to think in a year or so we'll be past this.

Hey CSS-Tricksters! A lot of folks tweeted, emailed, commented and even courier pigeoned (OK, maybe not that) stories about their personal journeys learning web development after we published "The Great Divide" essay. One of those stories was from Tim Smith and, it was so interesting, that we invited him to share it with the broader community. So, please help us welcome him as he elaborates on his unique personal experience and how it feels to be in his shoes as a front-ender.

Hi folks, my name is Tim Smith

I have ADD, OCD, Bi-Polar, Dyslexia… and not to mention that I am on the Autism spectrum. This combination (apart from causing me to feel a lot of personal shame) makes coding very hard — especially learning how to code, which I am trying to do. Things get mixed up in my head and appear backwards to the point that I find it nearly impossible to focus any longer than 15-20 minutes at a time. Perhaps I will expand on this in another post. Even now as I write this, I feel pulled to rate each song on YouTube Music and attempt to correct every mistake I make. And since I keep switching “write" with “right," this becomes infuriating and discouraging, to say the least.

I do not read well, so learning from books is the least effective way for me to learn (sorry O’Reilly). Online tutorials are OK, but I tend to sell myself short by being lazy with copy and paste for the code examples. If I force myself to hand-type the examples, I get the benefit of muscle memory but drown in the words of the tutorial and eventually lose interest altogether.

Video tutorials are my ideal learning method. There’s no reading involved and no way for me to copy and paste my way out of things. Having to stop and start the videos in order to type the code is maddening, but well worth it. YouTube is a great place for video tutorials if you have the patience to wade through them… which I don’t.

I found Chris Coyier in the early 2000s. The treasure trove of articles, guides, and videos contained here on CSS-Tricks has been a major benefit for me and actually progressed my ability to learn code. Later, I found Wes Bos. He, too, has been a leading contributor to my web learning. Wes unlocked many of the things I struggled with, namely React and the new features of ES6.

Together, I’d say Chris and Wes are responsible for at least 80% of my collective front-end knowledge. (Personal aside: Chris and Wes, you two are my heroes and secret mentors.) Both Chris and Wes have a way of giving me the information that's relevant to what I'm learning in a way that is fun and entertaining as well as straightforward and precise. They don’t just present the code; they explain the why and history behind each topic. Wes is a little better at this, but the sheer number of videos Chris has created has kept me busy for years and will continue to into the future.

Simply writing code is another effective way for me to learn. I like to geek-out and setup development servers for various web languages and libraries and play around. I have learned a lot about MacOS and Linux (mostly Ubuntu) while also learning the basics of many web languages and libraries: PHP (for WordPress themes), Python, React, Vue and many others. I learned to embrace the command line and avoid GUIs when possible. Nothing against GUIs; I simply find the command line more precise (and just between you and me, way cooler to brag about to non-coders).

I still do use the command line — or at least I would if I still had a laptop or desktop to work on. I am actually writing this on an iPad Mini 2. However, I have found another great way to write and share code without the need to set up servers and complicated environments: CodePen. I joined an early beta way back when and it was love at first sight. I can now write code, share it and get feedback all in one place (here’s my profile). Every time I get a fun idea or find a fun kata, I fire up Codepen and just start coding. No tricky dev setup. There are other apps that do this but CodePen is unique because of the social aspect and the ability to easily embed code samples on forums.

So, that’s a little about me. What I want to get into is how I learn HTML and CSS because it’s probably somewhat similar to yours, but different than how you might have gone about it.

Breaking into HTML

I learned HTML in a few different ways. At first, I would look at the source code of popular web sites. In the early nineties, when I started to learn HTML many, if not most, web browsers had the ability to show the source code of a website. I saw all of the tags, how they were used and the basic structure of the sites. I was able to reverse-engineer them. I had not learned CSS at the time, so my first websites were single column and very boring.

Quick aside: Without CSS, all websites are perfectly responsive and look great on any device or screen size. We break them with CSS, then need to fix them... ponder that a bit.

Thanks to source code, I began reading articles on the web and studied constantly. I found the DreamInCode forum which serves as a forum for all code disciplines and languages — similar to StackOverflow because, like StackOverflow, the people were arrogant and rude to newbies, at least in my experience. Still, I was able to see how people approached various HTML concepts and problems and this was the springboard upon which I launched my learning adventure. I received blunt, often harsh feedback on my code examples. As hard as it is to hear hard criticism, it benefitted me as it taught me the right and — even more importantly, the wrong — way to approach and write HTML.

Like most things, writing and mastering HTML is all about trial and error. I had to create hundreds of horrible websites (if you could call them that) before it “clicked" for me. But that’s better than nothing, as we’ve all heard it said before:

It was not long after that I was introduced to CSS, and then the real journey began...

Along came CSS

The easiest way for me to describe CSS is this: It’s the code that makes your HTML look nice." I had to adopt a KISS attitude as I learned CSS because I found that I was overthinking it. CSS is simple if you let it be. Let’s have a look:

This is about as simple as CSS is. Name your block in HTML (e.g. <div class="Tim">...</div>), then target that name in a CSS file with properties to describe the block, like colors, borders, font treatments among much, much more.

At first, I would spend all my time trying to memorize as many CSS properties as I could. I would “Alta Vista" (remember that?!) around for what sort of things others were doing with CSS and how they were doing it. This was fun and informative but only served to confuse me to no end. Trying to reverse-engineer CSS as I did with HTML only got me so far. My memory for stuff like this is poor, at best. I had to step back, take a deep breath (literally and figuratively) and find a new approach.

My thought process typically goes something like this:

Do I want the words to be black? If so, do nothing

What about the background color? The default white is boring so... give it a background color.

How big do I want the element to be? Don’t overthink this as far as measurement units go, because pixels are fine and, well, height and width seem pretty logical to me.

And so on. Simple questions with simple property names. My point is you can do some amazing things with simple CSS. It was that simplicity that made me want to learn and apply everything I found. But, at the same time, I was so overwhelmed that I almost quit web development for good. It’s an awkward conflict: the simplicity and elegance are welcoming and fun but the myriad possibilities are dizzying and impossible to retain.

What worked for me was taking an incremental approach to learn CSS. By starting small and slowly adding more as I truly learned and understood the properties. I found I could have fun and be creative at a comfortable pace without putting too much pressure on myself.

I won’t lie. I am not a designer. Given a blank canvas, I will freeze or come up with a mediocre design that’s derivative of a mish-mash of other designs I like. That said, I am great at coding a design that someone with actual design skills can put together (like this).

I fell in love with CSS for one reason: it is the perfect balance of logic and design. A lot of coding is like this. Code can be beautiful, but CSS is the bee’s knees for me!

JavaScript is hard! But I’m trying.

HTML and CSS came relatively easily to me. I stumbled a bit on CSS Grid and some of the more advanced stuff, but it just clicked for me. As I alluded to earlier, I am a visual learner. Both HTML and CSS are inherently visual languages, and they give me the instant gratification my ADD needs. Both are straightforward and commonsensical to me.

In contrast, Javascript is something I find to be very, very difficult. It is a logic-based language which would ordinarily be my cup of tea; nevertheless, I have found it challenging to “click" with. Despite a few epiphanies while learning it, JavaScript seems to elude me beyond the basics. I have completed Wes Bos’ JavaScript30 course along with many other tutorials. They make sense in the moment it’s being explained to me, but even still, when presented with a “blank canvas" so to speak, I forget most of the concepts and either write the same ol’ stuff over and over or simply give up.

Surprisingly, React came much more naturally to me. I think it has to do with its modularity and my love for blocks, LEGOs, and puzzles. I have learned it well enough that I have been able to be creative with it and have started writing an app with it: a crowd-sourced urban bathroom locator. I have written and rewritten the start of the app with various Flux libraries and backend data libraries. I invariably give up only to start again, like the famous definition of insanity. I just keep thinking I will figure it out and/or find someone to do the hard parts for me.

My roadblock with React is JavaScript, of course. That may not make sense, but remember my stance on blocks. I know React is JavaScript. To me, though, it is quite different than vanilla JavaScript. Closures, pure functions, arrow functions, let vs. const vs. var, the enormous set of built-in methods, not to mention imported libraries, classes, and of course, my nemesis, Big O (how I loath Big-O)... my head is spinning even as I write this.

I have no trouble learning the syntax. The hangup, I think, lays in a lack of computer science knowledge and this inability to think mathematically. Algorithms make sense in concept, but their practical application simply blows my mind.

For mental health reasons, it was necessary for me to step away from my web development career in 2005. I was able to get back into it around 2010 when I worked for a few startups, but I never truly got back in. Javascript is my Achilles heel. I was lucky to find a few jobs that were truly light on JavaScript so I could focus on HTML and CSS — the things I thought added up to front-end development — but inevitably, I was expected to write JavaScript beyond basic interface enhancements and the jobs fell apart. So I either quit or was fired.

The ongoing search for work

Looking for work in recent times has been a nightmare! We now live in a world dominated by JavaScript and it seems no one wants a front-end developer whose strengths lie in HTML, CSS with an intermediate knowledge of Javascript — especially those without a degree in Computer Science. I can’t even find a job posting for this on any major job site.

I have had the honor of interviewing with recruiters at Facebook, Google, and Apple but I could not get past the first round of phone screening. I was asked questions that I felt have little-to-nothing to do with what I understand front-end development to be. There were no questions about CSS best practices and even nothing about semantic HTML or the proper use of ARIA attributes. All they seemed to care about was Big O and efficient loops. Even interviews with smaller companies were like this. Have services like Wix and the like taken all the core front-end jobs away?

Despite all the challenges I have faced, I feel I have mastered HTML and CSS and have a baseline grasp on JavaScript. I am very proud of that. While I dream of getting a job at a large company like Facebook, Google, or Apple, I really just hope to find a role where my HTML and CSS skills will shine and I can gain real-world experience with JavaScript as a junior developer with the benefit of mentoring somewhere, like the San Francisco Bay Area where I currently live.

We all have different learning styles and paces, so don't give up before you have tried every possible way to learn what you are trying to do. And, if you come up with a new way, please share so we can all broaden our individual and collective knowledge.

I hope this article has reached at least one other developer like me! Thank you to all my predecessors. Happy coding!

Rik Schennink documents a system for being able to write CSS selectors that style a page when it has scrolled to a certain point. If you're like me, you're already on the lookout for document.addEventListener('scroll' ... and being terrified about performance. Rik gets to that right away by both debouncing the function as well as marking the event as passive.

The end result is a data-scroll attribute on the <html> element that can be used in the CSS. Meaning if you're scrolled to 640px down the page, you have <html data-scroll="640"> and could write a selector like:

Unfortunately, we don't have greater than (>) less than (<) selectors in CSS for things like numbered attributes, so the CSS styling potential is fairly limited here. You might ultimately need to update the JavaScript function such that it applies other classes or data attributes based on your math. But you'll already be set up for good performance here.

"Apply styles when the user has scrolled away from the top" is a legit use case. It makes me think of a once function (like we have in jQuery) where any scroll event would only be triggered once and then not again. They scrolled! So, by definition, they aren't at the top anymore! But that doesn't deal with when they scroll back to the top.

I find it generally more useful to use IntersectionObserver for styling things based on scroll position. With it, you can do things like, "has this element been scrolled into view or beyond," which is generically useful and can be used for scrolled-away-from-top stuff too.

Here's an example that adds or removes a class if a user has scrolled past a hidden pixel positioned at 500px down the page.

It sometimes takes a quick 35 seconds for a concept to really sink in. Mikael Ainalem delivers that here, in the case that you haven't quite grokked the concepts behind path-based CSS properties like clip-path and shape-outside.

Here are two of my favorites. The first demonstrates animating text into view using a polygon as a clip.

The second shows how the editor can help morph one shape into another.

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In a bid to have web applications serve needs for different types of users, it’s likely that more code is required than it would be for one type of user so the app can handle and adapt to different scenarios and use cases, which lead to new features and functionalities. When this happens, it’s reasonable to expect the performance of an app to dwindle as the codebase grows.

Code splitting is a technique where an application only loads the code it needs at the moment, and nothing more. For example, when a user navigates to a homepage, there is probably no need to load the code that powers a backend dashboard. With code splitting, we can ensure that the code for the homepage is the only code that loads, and that the cruft stays out for more optimal loading.

Code splitting is possible in a React application using React Loadable. It provides a higher-order component that can be set up to dynamically import specific components at specific times.

Component splitting

There are situations when we might want to conditionally render a component based on a user event, say when a user logs in to an account. A common way of handling this is to make use of state — the component gets rendered depending on the logged in state of the app. We call this component splitting.

We can have an openHello state in the App component with an initial value of false. Then we can have a button used to toggle the state, either display the component or hide it. We’ll throw that into a handleHello method, which looks like this:

We pass a function as a value to loader which returns the Hello component we created earlier, and we make use of import() to dynamically import it. The fallback UI we want to render before the component is imported is returned by loading(). In this example, we are returning a div element, though we can also put a component in there instead if we want.

Now, instead of inputting the Hello component directly in the App component, we’ll put LoadableHello to the task so that the conditional statement will look like this:

{
this.state.openHello ?
<LoadableHello />
: null
}

Check this out — now our Hello component loads into the DOM only when the state is toggled by the button:

And that’s component splitting: the ability to load one component to load another asynchronously!

Route-based splitting

Alright, so we saw how Loadable can be used to load components via other components. Another way to go about it is us ing route-based splitting. The difference here is that components are loaded according to the current route.

So, say a user is on the homepage of an app and clicks onto a Hello view with a route of /hello. The components that belong on that route would be the only ones that load. It’s a fairly common way of handling splitting in many apps and generally works well, especially in less complex applications.

Here’s a basic example of defined routes in an app. In this case, we have two routes: (1) Home (/) and (2) Hello (/hello).

As it stands, all components will render when a use switches paths, even though we want to render the one Hello component based on that path. Sure, it’s not a huge deal if we’re talking a few components, but it certainly could be as more components are added and the application grows in size.

Using Loadable, we can import only the component we want by creating a loadable component for each:

If the imported component will load fast, there is no need to flash a “loading” component. Thankfully, Loadable has the ability to delay the loading component from showing. This is helpful to prevent it from displaying too early where it feels silly and instead show it after a notable period of time has passed where we would expect to have seen it loaded.

Note that we’re actually combining the delay and error handling together! If there’s an error off the bat, we’ll display some messaging. If there’s no error, but 300ms have passed, then we’ll show a loader. Otherwise, load up the Hello component, please!

That’s a wrap

Isn’t it great that we have more freedom and flexibility in how we load and display code these days? Code splitting — either by component or by route — is the sort of thing React was designed to do. React allows us to write modular components that contain isolated code and we can serve them whenever and wherever we want and allow them to interact with the DOM and other components. Very cool!

Hopefully this gives you a good feel for code splitting as a concept. As you get your hands dirty and start using it, it’s worth checking out more in-depth posts to get a deeper understanding of the concept.